The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Living for Approval and Start Living for You

Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ambition. Is it a dirty word? Do you love the term, or hate it? In this episode of Hello Monday, Jessi Hempel sits down with two incredible colleagues at LinkedIn, Ahyiana Angel and Hayley Saltzman, to explore how our understanding of ambition evolves, and what it means to chase personal growth rather than external validation. Ahyiana Angel is the Podcast Ad Ops Producer at LinkedIn and the host of her own podcast called Switch, Pivot, or Quit. Hayley Saltzman is an Editor at Large at LinkedIn, recently focusing on vertical video strategy. Together, they reflect on how ambition is often shaped by external expectations and how true fulfillment comes when we start living for ourselves. In this episode, Jessi, Ahyiana, and Hayley discuss: The tension between extrinsic and intrinsic ambition Our gendered notions of ambition, and how society’s definition of ambition is often limiting for women What happens when you quit a dream job to pursue something more aligned with personal growth The relationship between fear and ambition Practical tips for reconnecting with your own ambitions and self-worth If you've ever questioned what success and ambition truly mean for you, this episode is for you. Whether you're navigating career transitions or redefining what ambition looks like in your life, we hope this conversation will inspire you to live and work authentically. Continue the conversation with us at Hello Monday Office Hours! Join us here, on the LinkedIn News page, this Wednesday at 3 PM EST.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn News
0:02.0	I don't think that there's anything wrong with the word ambition.
0:09.5	But when I think about applying it to myself, that is where I am physically getting uncomfortable.
0:15.3	If I were to think about how I would want others to describe me, describing me as ambitious, that wouldn't be my number one goal.
0:25.6	From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel, and this is Hello Monday.
0:29.7	It's our show about work on our own terms.
0:34.2	Ambition.
0:35.1	What do you think of the word?
0:36.8	Literally, I want you to stop wherever you are. If you're watching this, if you're listening, hold that word front of mind and answer me. Do you love this word or do you despise it? Do you want to be more ambitious or do you worry that you will be seen as ambitious? I really love this word. I have always felt ambitious.
0:57.2	As a young child, I knew about myself, that I was an ambitious person. And so I mistakenly thought
1:02.9	that everybody would feel about this word like I do. And I can tell you this, I am wrong about
1:07.8	that. We have a new tagline, right? Hello Monday is a show about work on our own terms.
1:14.3	And I quite like where we've landed with it, but it didn't start there.
1:18.3	It started in a room last fall where I gathered about a dozen of my colleagues.
1:23.7	I chose the folks that I feel most creatively in tune with, people who I respect and
1:28.8	admire, and frankly, people who are really crushing it around here. I wanted to come up with
1:33.4	this new tagline, and I put a whole bunch of ideas on the table. All of them, all of them,
1:39.4	to a T, had the word ambition in them, and finally one woman said, oh, I hate that word. It does not
1:46.3	represent me. And I thought, well, what's going on here? I mean, these are some of the most
1:51.3	ambitious women I know at this company. What's with this word? So today we're devoting the
1:56.9	entire episode to ambition. And because I've already told you that I love this word, I wanted to invite a couple of my colleagues in here who feel very differently about it.
2:06.6	Now, I have chosen two partners for this conversation who are literally and figuratively crushing it here.
	...

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